The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  “Please do, dear. And thank you for—”

  “I don’t want to go to sleep,” Kay pouted. “I want to stay here and listen to Peter’s story.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning, sweetheart. Up! Upsy-daisy! Kiss me good night and off with you.”

  “Oh, come on, Kay.” Margy held out a stubby-fingered, capable little hand. “Wait till you see the cute washroom we’ve got fixed up in the back of the tent. I tell you what. I’ll lend you my best pajamas and my very own bed.”

  “You mustn’t do that, Margy,” Helen protested. “Where will you sleep?”

  “Oh, I’m not supposed to sleep tonight. You see I’m all dressed.” She indicated her halter and shorts. “It’s Peter’s and my turn to be on watch.” I understood now how George had located his son without rousing the camp. “Come along Kay. Don’t be such a baby.”

  That got the brat. As the two ran off, I heard the small hostess warn, “Don’t make any noise and wake up the other girls.” They vanished inside the farther tent and I turned to hear George saying, “Night watch, eh? So there is something in these woods to be afraid of.”

  “No, sir. There isn’t really but we can’t ever make the new kids believe it, so Uncle John thought we ought to have a boy and a girl stay up every night to keep the fire burning and just be around.”

  “Peter.” Helen leaned forward, a curious light in her eyes. “Is it always the same two that stay up together?”

  “Why, yes, Ma’am. You see, when you’ve been on watch you’re let off chores and school the next day and everybody’s got a special job to do, like cooking or washing up or going in the woods or the fields to get things, so we’d get all mixed up if we did it any other way.”

  “Mmm. School, you said. Who teaches you?”

  “Why, Uncle John of course. And Aunt Mary. One of them’s here every day and they teach us all kinds of things, but they make us kids run things ourselves. We’ve got to learn how, they say, because we won’t always have them to depend on.”

  This had a startling implication. George put it into words.

  “You mean this—er—arrangement is permanent?”

  The lad’s brow knitted.

  “Permanent, dad? I—I don’t know—I can’t answer that.”

  “You can’t—Peter! That’s the first time you’ve ever said anything like that to me.”

  “Yes, sir.” The lad’s eyes lifted, met the gray ones so like them. “Yes,” he repeated, miserably. “It’s the first time. I—I’m sorry dad. I—We’ve all promised not ever to say anything about Tranquillia. That’s why we don’t write letters or—or anything, so we won’t slip up and give it away. We promised—”

  “Peter!” Bronzed hands, clasping the table’s edge, flattened fingertips against the wood. “You—”

  “George.” Helen touched the back of one of those corded hands. “He’s a child, George, and I’m sure you’ve taught him always to keep a promise.”

  The man swallowed, relaxed a little.

  “Listen, Son,” he said more quietly. “You know I would never ask you to do anything dishonorable, don’t you?”

  “No, Dad. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “Well then, you’ll believe me when I tell you it’s right for you to forget that promise and answer my questions frankly. First. Where, if you know, and what is this place you call Tranquillia?”

  “Tranquillia,” a new voice said, behind me, “Is a different world from that to which you belong.” John Barrett’s low and gentle voice. “It is a world where there is no hate, no strife and God willing shall never be, a clean, new world where a new race shall live in friendship and peace forever.”

  I turned and saw him standing there, the moonlight in his silken, silvery hair.

  CHAPTER X

  George Carson was on his feet, head and shoulders taller than John Barret but instead of the wrath I expected in his eyes there was a question, and wild surmise. “A new world,” he repeated, slowly, tasting the words. “Friendship. Peace forever. Do you mean all that, old man? Literally?”

  “I mean exactly that, Lieutenant Carson.”

  Helen was up too. She was trembling. With excitement, not fear. “Of course he does, George. I’ve known it ever since Peter said what he did about there being no animals here.”

  “I was afraid to let myself hope—God!” It wasn’t an expletive, it was almost a prayer. “I’m still afraid to let myself believe—”

  “Look,” I growled. “I don’t like to break up this love fest, but I’d like you birds to tell me how you expect to keep this Shangri-La a secret?” I was beginning to understand, or so I thought. “Sooner or later some plane’s going to wing over that cliff. The country its pilot belongs to will claim it, and some other nation will dispute that claim and—phtt—there goes your peace.” Barrett’s machine somehow had transported us; in no time flat, to—well, perhaps an unexplored region of Antarctica kept incongruously temperate by some whim of sun and air currents. “The Earth’s shrunk to a pretty small ball, you know, since the Wright brothers taught us to fly.”

  “Indeed it has,” Barret agreed. “Indeed it has, Mr. Gatlin, a ball far too small for the good of those who inhabit it. But this is not the Earth.”

  “Come again.”

  “At least not the Earth you’re thinking of,” he placidly continued. “Tranquillia, my friend, is a planet in another Space, another Time, than Terra.”

  “Look you!” I jabbed a forefinger at him. “Helen was trying to tell me something like that a-while back and I’ll say to you what I said to her. ‘There ain’t no sich animule.’”

  “Oh, you’re wonderful!” Her laugh had the very note and texture of the brook’s liquid tinkle. “But you’re too good a newspaperman to really mean it. Seeing is believing.”

  “So they say, but what do I see here to make me believe your fairy tale?” I waved an embracing arm. “Grass. Trees no more different from those we rode through this afternoon than those are from the ones that grew in Westchester when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The same moon. The—Uh!” My jaw dropped. “Say! What was in that Panjusade anyway? I can swear I see two moons.”

  I pulled the edge of my hand across my eyes, looked again. They were still there a reddish crescent just rising above the forest, another hanging golden and almost full above the black line of the colossal precipice.

  Barret chuckled. “Tranquillia has two moons, Mr. Gatlin. Hardly a matter for astonishment since Uranus, in our own Solar System, boasts four and Saturn ten.”

  Microscopic needles were again pricking my skin. I moistened my lips. “Okay. I’m licked. This isn’t the Earth. But how in the name of reason—? Listen. Unless you’ve a straitjacket handy, you’d better tell me how you got us here. And quick.”

  He smiled that slow, sweet smile of his.

  “That is not easy, to one as unacquainted with the latest physico-mathematical concepts as you’ve confessed yourself to be. May I suggest that we move to my classroom; that grassy knoll; and make ourselves comfortable while I attempt it—Oh, Peter!”

  The lad had been standing silently by through all this.

  “I think perhaps you can be excused from watch for the rest of the night.”

  “But Uncle John—!”

  “I know—you haven’t seen your father so long. To please me, Peter?”

  “I’ll see you in the morning, Dad.” He ran off. I saw George wince at that as I let myself down in the spot Barret had indicated and leaned my back against a tree that overhung the knoll, but Helen whispered something in his ear and he smiled, stretched out on the grass. The girl settled beside him, I noticed again how like a bird alighting she did so.

  Barret lowered himself, sat facing the three of us.

  “Space, Mr. Gatlin,” he began, “Is neither finite nor infinite—I beg your pardon.” He smiled apologetically. “Let me put it this way. Space is neither limited nor limitless.” Already he was beyond my depth but George was nodding wisely
and Helen looked as if she understood, so I thought I’d better keep quiet. “It curves in upon itself much as does the shell of an egg, except that the eggshell has an inside and an outside and Space has not. Is that clear?”

  “All but that last remark,” I bluffed. “How can anything not have an inside and an outside?”

  “Well, since it is not important for our present purpose, suppose we forget it. Let us just think of the Universe, everything that is and the reaches between, as our empty eggshell with, say, a hole at one end but otherwise unpunctured. An eggshell whose greatest circumference is approximately a billion light years.

  “Let us further assume that at the other end of our eggshell from the hole, there are two specks of dirt, one on the inner surface, one on the outer, separated only by the thickness of the shell. Imagine that a—a bacterium wishes to go from one speck to the other. It would have to go all along the shell’s surface to the hole at the farther end, through the hole and all the way back to the second speck, would it not?”

  “If it couldn’t go through the shell.”

  “Precisely. If it could find a way to penetrate the shell, it would shorten that journey of a billion light years to the infinitesimal part of a second.” Barret was triumphant. “And that is all there is to it. Earth is one speck, Tranquillia the other and I am the bacterium who has invented a method of warping Space to shortcut that billion years’ trip. There. It wasn’t so hard to understand after all, was it?”

  “No.” I was still almost completely befuddled, but I didn’t intend to admit it. “It’s as simple as figuring out why a gal who not so many hours ago told a man he was despicable should now be twining a strand of his hair around her forefinger.”

  “Oh!” Helen snatched her hand away. “I hate you!”

  “Don’t blame me, honey. It must be the effect of double moonlight.”

  “If that’s it,” George grunted, rolling over, “Blessed be the two moons of Tranquillia.” Propping himself on his elbows he looked fatuously down into her face. “Say, Pop. Did you ever notice she’s slightly cross-eyed?”

  “I am not! It’s just that I’m focusing a smudge at the tip of your nose.” Helen sat up. “Mr. Barret. You—How did you know, before you came through the first time, that you’d find yourself on another world this side of Space?

  “Suppose,” she caught her breath. “Suppose you’d come out in—in just empty nothingness?”

  “I should never have returned,” he replied, tranquility. “There were also the possibilities of my—shall I say materializing, for lack of a better word—on a blazing Sun or on an uninhabitable as well as uninhabited world, or within a planet’s rocky or lava-like interior.”

  “But you tried it anyway?”

  “Wouldn’t you have?” he asked, as though she could answer in only one way. Talk about your Columbus! Cristoforo at least knew that if he failed he’d drown or starve, or die in some other comparatively comfortable and approved manner. “However, in order that no one should follow me if I met with disaster, I took care to destroy all my notes on the construction of my machine, as you’ve called it, and instructed my wife to completely destroy it if I did not reappear within a certain short space of time.”

  “How could she?” George pulled himself up. “The machine wouldn’t have been there for her to destroy.”

  Barrett’s eyes twinkled. “Strangely enough, Lieutenant, it would have been. It is there now.”

  “You sent it back!”

  “No. It is still in the cavern where I wakened to find myself alone, and guessed where you’d gone, but it is also in my home in Westchester.”

  “Bunk,” I snorted. “You had me on the ropes for a while, but you’ve got another guess coming if you think you can get me to believe anything can be two places at once.”

  “I’m not trying to.” I had a suspicion he was covertly laughing at me. “My machine is in only one place, but that place happens to be common to both worlds, just as the point where the circumferences of two tangent circles meet is common to both.”

  “I give up.” It wasn’t he that had me defeated, it was those two moons riding gloriously in a sky of stars that, were not the stars one sees from Earth. “You bet your life against the quadrillion to one parlay that Earth and some other planet would touch each other in that room off your kitchen.”

  “The odds were not quite as much against me as that. Tangent circles, may I remind you, or spheroids, may lie within one another. I have not as yet collated enough data to demonstrate it mathematically, but I’m inclined to believe that Tranquillia and Terra are in some part co-extensive—”

  “Lay off,” I begged. “Please lay off me before I start looking for paper dolls to cut out.” I pressed my throbbing head. “All I want to know is how soon I get back to New York.”

  John Barret plucked a grass-blade, regarded it contemplatively. “That, Mr. Gatlin, is a problem. I have been wondering whether I can permit you to return at all.”

  CHAPTER XI

  “Easy, Pop.” George grabbed my arm. “Hold your fire.”

  “Hold nothing,” I grated. “If he thinks he—”

  “Please.” Helen was clinging to me. “Please calm down and let him explain.”

  “I don’t seem to have a chance to do anything else, the way you’re hanging on to me, but don’t get the idea he’s going to hypnotize me the way he has you two. I’m going back, or I’ll know the reason why.”

  “Precisely what I should like to tell you,” John Barret murmured in that mild way he had. “If you will permit me.”

  “Go on. But you’d better make it good.”

  He did.

  On his second visit here, he told us, he had explored this new world, had found that while its gravity, atmosphere, temperature range and other climatic conditions were fairly identical with those of Earth, no life existed anywhere on it that he could discover.

  There were only the trees and the plants, the fragrant breeze and a deep, unbroken tranquility.

  He had returned to a world torn by war, a world of organized killing, of shattered cities and enslaved nations, even his own beloved Science prostituted to the uses of brutality.

  “I proposed to Mary,” he continued, “That we pass through and smash the machine so that we could not be followed, and live out what little time was left to us, quietly in this quiet forest. She made me see how wrong this was. She made me understand that God could not mean the gift a new and unspoiled world for us alone. Yes.” He looked up at some sound in my throat. “Yes, I believe in Him. The more I have learned of the infinite, yet ordered complexity of His Universe, the more firmly convinced I have been that only He could have built it.”

  The plan they settled on was very simple, almost naive. They would take to Tranquillia a group of children old enough to adapt quickly to new conditions, not yet old enough to unlearn the ways of the sorry world they were leaving. “If we could have brought here all the children of Earth,” he sighed, “It would have satisfied us better, but that of course was impossible. We decided that a dozen boys and girls were enough to be the progenitors of a new race whose religion, implanted from its very birth will be the holiness of neighborliness, the sanctity of human life.”

  Helen’s hand had crept into George’s. In the soft glow of Tranquillia’s moons their faces were calm and peaceful. I recalled how dark and bitter those faces had been on the Sawmill River Road. I remembered George’s despairing cry, “We’re trapped. We’re trapped without hope of escape.”

  But Barret was still talking. “I think it was I who thought of how to accomplish our plan with the least danger of interference. I recalled a story a member of our Local Draft Board had told at the village store, how they’d had to turn down, because he had two children, a widower who had been most anxious to get into the army. We placed the first advertisement in the Globe the next day. You know how it read.”

  “Yes,” I observed, dryly. “I know how it read. It was a smart scheme. You could insist
on the children you took having no one interested in them except their fathers, and since they were going into combat, you could be pretty certain of not being caught up with till the war’s over. But what’s going to happen then? What about those fathers when they come back?”

  His face went bleak and for a moment there was a spark of fanatic fire in his eyes. “Some will not return. Those who do—will find an empty cottage and a heap of twisted, un-analyzable metal in a lead-sheathed room.”

  “Good Lord, man!” I was appalled. “You can’t do that to them!”

  “Why not?” This was George. “When you think of the millions of fathers and mothers who have given their children to war, why is it so terrible that a dozen should give theirs to peace?”

  “Because—Look here! You were throwing conniption fits in my office this noon because you merely suspected something phony had happened to Peter. Suppose you’d found that house in Westchester empty when we’d got there? No sign of him, no sign of the people you’d left him with. No trace of any of them, ever. How would you have felt?”

  “What difference would that make? Pete would be here, wouldn’t he? He won’t have to live in the world as it’s going to be like when this thing’s over. He won’t have to face the misery that’s ahead. He won’t ever have to see everything he’s dreamed of and hoped for and worked to help build smashed because of some megalomaniac’s lust for power. Isn’t that worth whatever I would have had to go through?”

  “You can say that because you know you won’t have to go through it. Helen. You’re with me, aren’t you?”

  Her hands twisted in her lap and a pulse throbbed in the shadowed hollow beneath her throat. “I—I’m sorry for those fathers, dreadfully sorry, but I think George is right. You—If you had a child, you’d understand. If you’d lain awake night after night, listening to her breathe while you stared burning-eyed into the black future, trying so hard, so desperately hard, to see one single, tiny ray of hope for her happiness.”

  “Well, maybe I’m wrong.” I might be, as far as what I’d been saying went, but there was still something askew about this set-up. Something—I couldn’t put salt on its tail, couldn’t get it out to the forepart of my brain. “So what?” I settled down again. “What does it all add up to? I seem to remember your setting out, Mr. Barret, to explain to me why you’re wondering whether you ought to let us go back where we came from.”